This is my first post so I apoligise if I am not posting in the correct section, I'm not sure whether this should be here or not.

I installed SL7 on my workstation about a month ago, and I installed various softwares on it related to numerical modelling. (Fortran compilers / matlab / CFD software among others). I set up a few user accounts, and add some of them to the sudoers list in order to install other applications they might need (more specifically for visualisation, e.g. Paraview).

The thing is that since about a week now, we encounter some problems when we try to switch between user accounts.

When choosing switch user from the desktop, the window that appears presents the same user name as the one that just left his desktop and asks for a password. Until now everything is normal. However, when clicking on "log in as a different user", it keeps coming back to the same user asking for his password instead of presenting the users list. I removed some of the commands defined by one of the users in the .bash_profile file to see if the problem could come from there.

I succeeded to bypass that by opening a console with Ctrl + Alt + F1/F9, logging in as a different user and starting gnome with startx. However, what happened a couple of times is that when I tried to switch user again, the screen just got black with an underscore present on the top left, and it was not possible to do anything else on the workstation except a manual restart...

I am new to linux so I would be very grateful if someone knows how to solve this issue or has faced something similar in the past!

Thanks for any solutions or tips!

Matthurin

P.S : When I logged in as root, it told me to run the following command (copied here with its output)